200mphmedia's Posts

Rob:  Thanks aplenty!  No issues taken.  Some of the text we just copied from client provided stuff.  I’ll mark up the prototype for the review re: your corrections.  If you find any more, shoot them to me at herb200mph@gmail.com if you will.  Easier to do that way.  The client will get a last look at the entire book anyway, so the typos were not an issue, but better we point them out ourselves.

We shall be more diligent with this stuff in the books we have commissioned after this one.  Bunches of them for 2009…pant, pant, pant.

Received the prototype in advance of worldwide sales of the Royal Langkawi Yacht Club’s 2008 Regatta.  The books is absolutely perfect and the colors were crisp, clean, bright and exactly to the design.  Size = 13×11 w/ dust jacket.

You can see an online version of the pages at this link:

http://www.ipubmediagroup.com/2008-RLIR-SoftProofs/RLIR2008SOFTPROOF2.html

Production Info:  All pages were  created completly using XaraExtremePro 4.  Pages were to size with images cropped to fit the layouts.  All text was added over the photos.  Three separate images made up the page backgrounds and all photos and visual modification were produced within Xara.  Tables were created in MS Word and imported into XEP4 as windows metafiles.  Perfect results.

Bottom Line:  An absolutely perfect publication!!!! 

There are no videos that I know of, but I think Blurb sells a HOW TO MAKE A BOOK book for $14.95 in the Bookstore.  If you have never done a book, might be a good investment.

Regarding videos/tutorials on BookSmart itself, I am not aware of any.  There is a need for some tutorials/tips/tricks/how-do’s but not sure if it would be worth if for a third-party to develop them, given they would have to be sold to end users.

However, for something on the cost-economic side, perhaps some webinars might work on a pay-per-view basis.  Something to mull over.  I might do something along those lines over the holidays.  Can’t this week, presenting a seminar are Joomla! 1.5 at a community college, so need to prep.

FYI.  What I really want to start is a forum operation that has topics, threads, email notification of postings, topic watches—something more dynamic than this one and a way for other users to help each other solve problems and increase skills in using BookSmart so they can publish more, great looking books.

If a BookSmart user is just a tad smarter than the average bear and wants to do some experimenting, its amazing how creative the pages and content can get.  My pages all have custom backgrounds with photo/text overlays, etc.  Once you learn how to modify the templates (not recommended for the average user who doesn’t have computer moxey), you can set up the pages as you want and create away.

Check out www.xara.com for the xara extreme pro program. 

I just did a complete 13×11 book with pages created outside of BookSmart with text over photos in all kinds of combinations.  My text test pages had type as small as 8pts and it came out crisp and sharp.  I modified a page layout for a single full-bleed photo with only footers for page numbers.  Perfect results.  All the folio numbers came out white reverse on the photos.  I used BookSmart to generate the page numbers.  Every page was a composite 13×11 image with all textual information embeded before importing the .jpg file for each page.

I just exported PP to JPG and imported into BookSmart.  It was at the wrong resolution because you cannot "up" the resolution to 300 dpi.  BookSmart tagged the image with an alert.

However, taking the SAME image, importing into XARA, then exporting it back to JPG at 300 dpi produced a prefect result at the page size.  I worked in 13×11 format.

UPDATE

Formatted Excel spreadsheet can be copied and pasted as a wmf format directly into Xara.

When it gets into Xara, all the components of the spreadsheet are individually edited image items.  Select ALL again and Group to get it as a scalable and placable image.

Hope this does it for you.  It will work perfectly for my project.

Same problem.  I need to publish a columnar list in a 13×11 book.  I am preparing to print a book full of experimental layout variations to see what does and does not work as the end product.

I am going to create MS Word doc that is a table, then print to .pdf, then convert to .jpg and then crop and chop.  I will insert the .jpg into the page and see how it prints.

Will post a "results" message here when completed.

Dev.

Write me at HERB 

FYI.  I develop in size 909×783 for the 13×11 book.  That is the page size that BookSmart uses in its page definitions.  I modified one of the pages to put the footers as page numbers in a specific x-y coordinate and build my pages with that location in mind.  I use a full page layout from my program for all the pages and everything seems to go in okay.  No alarms or warnings, etc.

For one, vBulletin at www.vbulletin.com would be a perfect one to use.  $160 to own it perpetually, $80 for a one-year lease.  Its easy, powerful, fully featured and will make your BookSmart users much happier.

I’d even volunteer to moderate the board, or event set it up on our server if you want under some sort of "User Group" domain name, etc.

The new forum is a clunker.  Before, all we had to do is look at one list of postings.  Now, we have to navigate into six sections on a very, very outdate forum format software configuration.

Why not just dump this thing and install a $99 package that allows better front end visuals, topic threading, notifications of replies, etc. etc.  There are probable a dozen such packages available on the "cheap" that you could put in place of this programmer created, task intensive, under performing forum.

Please?????